DHTML Editing Control and IE7+

The webdevtools team has historically owned a control that shipped with IE5.5 and above. This control is the DHTML Editing Control. In order to improve security in IE7+, we took a hard look at this control and decided to remove it from Vista and IE7+. A post I made yesterday on the IE blog talks about this in detail. Please read it at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/27/648850.aspx and let us know if you have any questions about this change. In particular I'd like to hear if you have an app that relies on this control and discuss your migration path with you.

We reference the dhtml edit control for IE5 throughout our VB6 applications, your posting states you were releasing a separate install of the DHTML Editing Control For Applications. Is this what I need to get my apps running in Vista? Where do I get it? Recomendations?
jerry@icusofware.com

I would recommend taking a look at www.freetextbox.com. It provides a pretty good alternative to this control and hopefully you can integrate it in pretty easily.

Tom Dolezal

14 Aug 2006 4:10 PM

If you remove dhtmled.ocx from Vista/IE7, will the functions of mshtml.dll (contenteditable=true) be available under Vista/IE7?

Jian Cai

6 Oct 2006 2:19 PM

Hi,
I am coverting VC++ Windows application to Vista. We use DHTMLSafe control in our code. I try to change it to DHTMLEdit because DHTMLEdit implements all of DHTMLSafe methods and events, and we are not web application. We thought it would work, but it did not. I want to know why and want to find a way to make it work.
I have a piece of code as following:
GetObjectFromWebBrowser(IWebBrowser* pWebBrowser, IDispatch** pDispatch)
{
CComPtr spDispatch;
pWebBrowser->get_Document(&spDispatch);
CComQIPtr spDocument(spDispatch);
CComPtr spElement;
hr = spDocument->getElementById(T2OLE( "DHTMLEdit1" ), &spElement);
CComQIPtr spObject(spElement);
spObject->get_object(pDispatch);
...
}
"DHTMLEdit1" was defined in xxxx.htm like that:
CLASSID="clsid:2D360201-FFF5-11d1-8D03-00A0C959BC0A" ID="DHTMLEdit1" ...
The code works fine on XP and 2000.
To replace DHTMLSafe with DHTMLEdit, I changed clsid to 2D360200-FFF5-11d1-8D03-00A0C959BC0A.
I run it on 2000, the last sentence spObject->get_object(pDispatch) got E_ACCESSDENIED error.
Did I do anything wrong? Why can't I use DHTMEdit control here?
Jian

Thank you for the feedback. I was definately not an easy decision for the removal of this control from Vista. The more detailed reasoning for its removal is provided on the following blog post on the IE blog:

One goal we had was to announce this change more than six months in advance to Vista's general availability in order to give an opportunity for dependant applications to address the change.

There are several strategies on how to update an applicaiton to deal with this change. If you are interesting in consulting with our team about them, please contact me at omark-at-microsoft-dot-com. Thanks.

--Omar

Walt

1 Dec 2006 2:20 PM

What about us poor sappy end-users who have a third party app with no control over the code? I have downloaded the DHTML control for Vista listed above and I too have had no luck with it. I understand why you removed the control but make a working one EASILY available to us network admins who need to supprot our users instantly. If we are willing to install it and potentially open a hole then shame on us if anything happens.

Jason

2 Dec 2006 6:04 PM

It is interesting. I have down loaded the "Fix" and my application. Webmail for Exchange and I still can not reply to any e-mail thru it.

ANy help would be GREAT!

Thanks,

Fustrated New Vista User in AZ

Frustrated AB CA

20 Jan 2007 1:13 PM

From my researching, the MS fix available only helps with Application, not the browser. That means OWA2003 and you won't be able to write in many online forums. I'm looking for an alternative browser. Firefox does not work as it relies on Windows componenet.

It is true that the downloadable component only helps with client applications and not browser based ones. We took a conscious decision to do this and it was not an easy decision - the reason for doing this was to make Vista more secure by default.

While I appreciate the difficulty of your decision to break my web-based database application, which relies on the dhtml contol to allow users to enter rich text in a suite of 23 Lotus Domino databases, I would appreciate even more some help on a reasonable substitute.